Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Parallel Object-Oriented Language A-NETL

Abstract

A-NETL is a parallel object-oriented language intended to be used for managing small to massive parallelism with medium grain size. Its design goals are to treat data parallel operations at the same cost as programming languages of the SIMD type, to support various styles of message passing among objects, and to provide several synchronization facilities for realizing autonomous control of objects. Starting with these design principles, we present the syntax and semantics of the language features, and its implementation issues, such as the reduction of message communication cost, efficient implementation of statically and dynamically created massive objects, the realization of synchronization schemes, and the object-to-node allocation scheme to minimize communication cost. We present performance results from the language's implementation on an A-NETL oriented multicomputer, on the AP1000 using the AP1000's message passing library and on a cluster of workstations using the PVM library.